Thursday, 30 June 2016

The little feathers trapped in amber are assumed to be almost 100 years old. Whereas New Scientist reports that they belonged to tiny flying dinosaurs, National Geographic is more forthright and acknowledges that what was found was dinosaur-era bird wings:

“Rare Dinosaur-Era Bird Wings Found Trapped in Amber. Bone, tissue, and feathers show the almost 100-million-year-old wings are remarkably similar to those on modern birds.”

They sure look like bird wings with modern-looking feathers.

The NG article states:

“Two tiny wings entombed in amber reveal that plumage (the layering, patterning, coloring, and arrangement of feathers) seen in birds today already existed in at least some of their predecessors nearly a hundred million years ago.”

But then NG couldn’t resist interpreting the finds from a philosophical perspective:

“A study of the mummified wings, published in the June 28 issue of Nature Communications and funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council, indicated they most likely belonged to enantiornithes, a group of avian dinosaurs that became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.”

Here’s the gist of the science part. It certainly does not suggest that the feathers came from dinosaurs:

“The two new samples, weighing in at only 0.06 and 0.3 ounces (1.6 and 8.51 grams), contain bone structure, tracts of feathers, and soft tissue. They are the first Cretaceous plumage samples to be studied that are not simply isolated feathers, according to study co-author Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences.”

Soft tissue has also been found in Archaeopteryx feathers.

The very idea of soft tissue lasting “150 million years” or even “100 million years” is anything but credible.

But NG goes on to say:

“Skin, muscle, claws, and feather shafts are visible in both samples, along with the remains of rows of primary asymmetrical flight feathers, secondary feathers, and covert feathers. All are similar in arrangement and microstructure to modern birds.”

Is there anything in the feathers that would suggest a dinosaur connection?

No. All the details point to a bird as the owner of these exquisite body parts. Darwinian evolution assumes that dinosaurs turned into birds, but given the enormous number of changes that would be needed in such a transformation, this scenario belongs to the realm of science fiction.

Recently, some researchers acknowledged that they doubt the existence of dark energy.

Early galaxies grew too fast for the Big Bang.

And then there’s the issue of antimatter. Or, to put it more precisely: There isn’t any antimatter, although there should be, if the Big Bang were true.

This is no laughing matter. ABS Science says:

“The Standard Model of particle physics — which accurately describes all the particles and interactions that make up our universe — says our universe shouldn't exist.

Or at least, the matter that makes up all the stuff in existence shouldn't be here. It should have been wiped out by the matching antimatter that was created with it in the first second after the Big Bang.”

The BB should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but the antimatter has obvious gone AWOL and is not about to return.

Matter and antimatter would have destroyed each other, thus leaving no universe for us to study.

Each particle (electron, proton, neutron etc.) should have a matching antiparticle with the opposite charge.

Researchers are currently trying to simulate the assumed conditions following the Big Bang. They are smashing particles together near the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in order to figure out how the world of matter got rid of the antimatter.

But all the facts suggest that there never was a Big Bang. The BB has to be propped up with unknown and totally hypothetical entities or features to keep it alive.

Some of the attempts used in bolstering up faith in an old solar system are beginning to sound like the epicycles that were used to explain the movements of the planets in the ancient Ptolemaic (geocentric) system.

An even more desperate attempt is to speculate about multiverses or multiple universes that are totally unscientific.

Sunday, 26 June 2016

The Bible describes ants as very industrious creatures. ”Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!” Proverbs 6:6 (NIV) exhorts us.

This is no empty plea: Some ants are capable of building anthills that are over 9 metres (30 feet) high.

Taking their size into account, humans would have to erect buildings that are over 2 kilometres (1.25 miles) high to be able to compete with these clever builders.

Ants can make use of temperature differences in order to cool their mounts and use hi-tech to keep their body temperature bearable in a hot desert. They are also known to be good at mathematics and be able to build living rafts.

Now, a paper published in PLOS ONE suggests ants already used an elaborate farming system “25 million years ago”. The study looks at what we see termites doing in our time:

“Termites are among the most diverse and ecologically important groups of insects in modern ecosystems, playing a critical role as natural decomposers of plant tissues. Termites typically rely on gut symbionts to decompose organic matter. However, members of the subfamily Macrotermitinae have turned to agriculture by developing a highly specialized, symbiotic relationship with fungi of the genus Termitomyces (Basidiomycotina). The fungus-growing termites cultivate fungi in gardens/chambers inside the colony and then exploit the ability of the fungi to convert recalcitrant, nitrogen-poor, plant material into a more easily digestible, protein-rich food source After ingestion and brief mastication of woody material, modern Macrotermitinae excrete rounded pellets known as primary faeces or mylospheres, composed of concentrated, undigested plant fragments and Termitomyces spores, which germinate and colonize the plant material, thus forming fungal gardens. The critical ecological role of fungus-growing termite colonies as biodiversity and bioproductivity hotspots within African savannah ecosystems has been well documented in recent years. Indeed, much of the decomposition of woody plant material in Africa and Asia takes place as a result of fungus-growing termites, with estimates suggesting that more than 90% of dry wood in some semiarid savannahs is reprocessed by members of the Macrotermitinae.”

And then it suggests that ants were the first insect farmers. They haven’t changed their habits in the meanwhile.

What the paper doesn’t say is that ants challenge the very idea of Darwinian evolution: These intelligently made animals are living fossils that haven’t changed for “100 million years”.

Friday, 24 June 2016

Mudskippers will dry out if they’ll adopt a terrestrial lifestyle. Image courtesy of H. Krisp, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Joel Kontinen

New research proposes that sea animals might have “evolved the ability to live on land many times,” as a report posted on Science Daily puts it.

This challenges “the perception that this extreme lifestyle shift was likely to have been a rare occurrence in ancient times. New research shows 33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviors are likely to have evolved independently in the different families.”

This Darwinian optimism might be uncalled for, however:

Convergent evolution has for ages been the standard Darwinian method for explaining away features shared by unrelated species, such as echolocation in bats and dolphins.

However, the transition from land to sea – another Darwinian dogma associated with the jump from sea to land – is likewise fraught with difficulties. Mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski calculates that a cow-like creature living on dry land would have needed at least 50, 000 morphological changes for such a move. From skin to the breathing apparatus, almost everything has to be changed if the cow wants to stay alive in its new watery environment. Like transforming a car into a submarine, it needs an enormous amount of changes.

Moreover, Tiktaalik, once assumed to be the earliest terrestrial creature, has lost its iconic status, as land animals predate it by several million years according to the evolutionary timescale.

Now, evolutionary ecologist Dr Terry Ord, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of New South Wales and a co-author of a new paper published in the journal Evolution, acknowledges that the real threat for sea animals trying to settle on land is drying out:

"The real difficulty in developing a fully-fledged terrestrial lifestyle may be in preventing drying out. This has direct consequences for them breathing on land because they still require their gills, which need to stay moist to function properly."

Mudskippers can jump onto land but if they won’t return to the sea, they will eventually dry out. They are not designed to be terrestrial creatures.

Darwinian stories tend to be entertaining but often a bit fishy.

Source:

University of New South Wales. 2016. Fish out of water are more common than thought. Science Daily. (22 June).

‘Exceptionally’ is the key word in a paper recently published in Nature Communications on microfossils discovered the Gunflint Chert in Canada. They are assumed to be 1.88 billion years old, but they don’t appear to be that ancient:

“The significant degradation that fossilized biomolecules may experience during burial makes it challenging to assess the biogenicity of organic microstructures in ancient rocks. Here we investigate the molecular signatures of 1.88 Ga Gunflint organic microfossils as a function of their diagenetic history. Synchrotron-based XANES data collected in situ on individual microfossils, at the submicrometre scale, are compared with data collected on modern microorganisms. Despite diagenetic temperatures of ~150–170 °C deduced from Raman data, the molecular signatures of some Gunflint organic microfossils have been exceptionally well preserved. Remarkably, amide groups derived from protein compounds can still be detected.”

The researchers suggest that the microfossils resemble modern cyanobacteria. They are also known as blue-green algae and they are featured in several evolutionary stories.

They are the earliest living fossils.

We would not expect to find remains of proteins in “1.88 billion- year-old” fossils.

“The present study shows that, in addition to the fine-scale morphologies, the molecular biosignatures of some Gunflint organic microfossils have been exceptionally preserved. In fact, despite the 1.88-Gyr-long geological history that they experienced, Kakabeka Falls and Schreiber Beach organic microfossils exhibit C- and N-XANES spectra sharing strong similarities to those of modern cyanobacteria and modern micro-algae. Despite a higher content of aromatic compounds compared to modern microorganisms, these microfossils exhibit a quite high content of oxygen-based functional groups (carbonyl, phenolic, carboxylic and hydroxyl groups). In addition, these microfossils still contain amide functional groups (absorption feature at 288.2 eV), which were likely to be involved in the proteinaceous compounds synthetized by the once living organisms.”

Once again, the facts do not support the evolution story. If practically no change occurs in “1.88 billion years”, evolution is in big trouble.

Monday, 20 June 2016

In the first century A.D., the apostles had to fight against false doctrines and false gospels that sought to undermine Christianity.

Gnostic gospels portrayed a Jesus that was different from what the four genuine Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) tell us.

In 2012, Harvard professor Karen King went public with a fourth-century document that said Jesus was married. Written in Coptic, it is a fragment that includes Jesus’ dialogue with His disciples.

The New Testament gospels were all written in the first century, so the Coptic text is a lot younger.

It is not the only attempt to provide a wife for Jesus, who, given His extraordinary mission was not married – at least there’s nothing in the New Testament that suggests He was.

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife has made headlines in recent days. An article in Life Science explains why:

“A papyrus holding text that suggests Jesus Christ was married and whose authenticity has been a matter of intense debate since it was unveiled in 2012 is almost certainly a fake.

Karen King, the Harvard professor who discovered the Gospel of Jesus's Wife and has defended its authenticity, has now conceded that the papyrus is likely a forgery and that its owner lied to her about the provenance and his own background.”

The article goes on to say:

“The concession comes after Walter Fritz, a resident of North Port, Florida, revealed that he is the owner of the papyrus that claims Jesus had a wife. Fritz said this to Ariel Sabar, a journalist for The Atlantic who wrote an exposé published June 15.

Less than a day after that article was published, more documents came out revealing a fake Greek manuscript the owner had posted on his website and a blog in which the owner’s wife talks of restoring a second century Christian gospel, a project that apparently left part of the manuscript in fragments.

Then on the evening of June 16, King conceded that the papyrus is likely a forgery. The new evidence ‘tips the balance toward forgery,’ King told Sabar."

False gospels differ diametrically from authentic Scripture. Details suggest that the NT gospels are eyewitness documents. Archaeology confirms that the Bible is about real history and real people.

And the real Jesus rose from the dead in a real resurrection.

Sceptics have launched many more or less bizarre attempts to discredit the Bible but they have all failed.

Saturday, 18 June 2016

Are atheists embracing religious belief? Writing in The Spectator, journalist Daniel Jackson thinks that they are.

But it is not a theistic faith they have accepted. They obviously believe that they can evolve into secular gods, with a little help from technology.

This approach is known as trans-humanism or post-humanism.

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk famously said that we might be living in a computer simulation.

This, of course, would necessitate belief in some sort of intelligent design, as a computer simulation does not just happen.

Some believe that given “the increasing pace of progress in computer technology, we will eventually be able to synthesise reality and consciousness.”

Mr. Musk’s beliefs prompted Jackson to write:

“It is a tired argument, but Atheists are increasingly behaving like members of a religious sect. There is factionalism and infighting amongst them. They have icons; Spinoza, Darwin, Dawkins (and something close to a martyr in Christopher Hitchens). And now they can choose to believe in a creator.”

Atheists can revere Charles Darwin, as he popularised a creation myth known to both ancient Indian and Greek philosophers, featuring descent with modification in which marine creatures crawl onto dry land and gradually change into terrestrial animals and some eventually into humans.

This, if anything, is a religious view but a version that knows nothing of sins committed against a transcendental Creator and their dire consequences.

Atheists want to have a say in how this assumed evolution will proceed in the coming days. While scientism seems to run the show, a better word might be wishful thinking.

Thursday, 16 June 2016

Dark energy and dark matter are supposed to account for over 95 per cent of the matter and energy in the universe. No one knows whether they actually exist, but Big Bang cosmology requires them.

Some astronomers think that it is time to get rid of dark energy, or the assumed 68 per cent. Thomas Buchert of the école Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, predicts that in ten years' time, dark energy will be gone. He and other dissidents believe that it is an illusion “created by the machinery of the standard model [i.e. the Big Bang]”.

According to evolutionary logic, we are ultimately the products of a quantum fluctuation that occurred for no reason at all.

Evolutionist think that they are formed of stardust.

The Big Bang model has run into dire problems. Early galaxies formed too fast and the horizon problem still causes headaches for big bangers.

Cosmic inflation cannot salvage it as it lacks evidence.

No wonder some have proposed even weirder solutions, such as multiverses which belong to the realm of science fiction.

When one tries to explain away the amazing fine tuning that exists practically everywhere in the universe by invoking purely naturalistic causes or even luck, logic loses and the illogical sphere gets bigger.

Source:

Ananthaswamy, Anil. 2016. Dark energy must die – these rebel physicists can take it down. New Scientist (15 June).

Tuesday, 14 June 2016

Small creatures can be surprisingly intelligent. Ants seem to be able to count. Honeybees might build a mental map and their waggle dance is truly amazing.

Previous research has shown that bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) used a flower's electric field to find out whether other bumblebees had already been to the flower and whether it was worth going to.

A new paper published in PNAS looks at bumblebees’ ability to detect weak electric fields:

“Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) use information from surrounding electric fields to make foraging decisions. Electroreception in air, a nonconductive medium, is a recently discovered sensory capacity of insects, yet the sensory mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we investigate two putative electric field sensors: antennae and mechanosensory hairs.”

What follows does not sound like it’s the work of the Blind Darwinian Watchmaker and reminds us that despite their name, bumblebees are anything but bumbling creatures:

“Examining their mechanical and neural response, we show that electric fields cause deflections in both antennae and hairs. Hairs respond with a greater median velocity, displacement, and angular displacement than antennae. Extracellular recordings from the antennae do not show any electrophysiological correlates to these mechanical deflections. In contrast, hair deflections in response to an electric field elicited neural activity. Mechanical deflections of both hairs and antennae increase with the electric charge carried by the bumblebee. From this evidence, we conclude that sensory hairs are a site of electroreception in the bumblebee.”

The animal kingdom abounds with designed features that challenge Darwinian evolution, for instance jellyfish navigation, the gliding skills of lemurs, gecko feet and the co-ordinated flight of tens of thousands of starlings.

Sunday, 12 June 2016

Darwinian just so stories tend to be entertaining. One ingredient that they do not lack is imagination. Here’s a recent example, featuring monkeys and researchers who associate old monkeys’ calls with language evolution:

“Monkeys lose the ability to consciously control their calls as they age, which may have limited the evolution of language in non-human primates.”

May, might and could are popular Darwinian words that we often see in science texts. A plausible translation is that they don’t have a clue as to how a trait came into being but they assume that it must have come about via an evolutionary pathway.

When it comes to speech, apes and monkeys just don’t have the necessary organs. No amount of wishful thinking can be of any help.

For Darwinists, the origin and evolution of language is an enigma. Some refer to it as Darwin’s problem (but it’s not his only one). It cannot be solved by storytelling.

However, they have tried a variety of approaches, for instance apes gesticulating with their arms, taming ourselves, gorilla song, and marmoset communication featuring listening.

But none of them are convincing. Apes differ too much from us.

Evolutionists have grossly exaggerated the language skills of Kanzi, the famous bonobo. Contrary to what we were told, it failed to understand basic grammar and could certainly not speak.

There is a much more logical explanation for the origin of the language groups we humans and no animals have: the Tower of Babel account in Genesis 11.

Friday, 10 June 2016

No room for Darwinian randomness in the miRNA world. Image courtesy of Kelvinsong, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Joel Kontinen

Randomness is one of the keywords of Darwinian evolution, but we see an entirely different picture in the real word. Take, for instance, the part of our genome once dismissed as junk because researchers did not know what it did.

Now, researchers are beginning to understand that non-coding RNA has several essential functions. According to an article posted on News Medical:

“Gene expression in cells and tissues of every complex organism is precisely controlled and largely dependent on different conditions (such as development, changes in the environment, diseases or drugs). Various cells and organ systems within such organism (including humans) contain different gene expression profiles, thus proper understanding of regulatory mechanisms involved in such expression represents one of the key issues in genomic medicine.”

The language is anything but Darwinese, and there’s more to come:

“Non-coding RNA molecules have a role in plethora of regulatory events – from controlling the number of copies in bacterial division to X-chromosome inactivation in mammals. Recent analyses of the human and animal genomes have shown that most of RNA transcripts do not code for proteins (i.e. they are messenger RNAs or mRNAs), but are instead noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs).

MicroRNAs (or miRNAs) comprise a novel class of small, non-coding endogenous RNAs that regulate gene expression by directing their target mRNAs for degradation or translational repression. Their discovery added a new dimension to the understanding of complex gene regulatory networks in humans and animals alike.”

The article also highlights the importance of microRNAs:

“miRNAs represent small RNA molecules encoded in the genomes of plants and animals. These highly conserved 22 nucleotides long RNA sequences regulate the expression of genes by binding to the 3'-untranslated regions (3'-UTR) of specific mRNAs. A growing body of evidence shows that miRNAs are one of the key players in cell differentiation and growth, mobility and apoptosis (programmed cell death).”

In other words, there is nothing even remotely Darwinian in microRNAs.

Medical researchers can no longer ignore the existence of miRNAs as we have roughly a thousand of them and they appear to be vital for our health.

In the animal kingdom, they have knocked down Darwin’s Tree of Life.

Other forms of RNA are likewise timely reminders of the defects of evolution. Messenger RNA plays a major role in wound healing.

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

New research suggests that DNA is a lot more complicated than this. Image courtesy of Richard Wheeler, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Joel Kontinen

Gone are the old Darwinian days when parts of our DNA – and that of other organisms – were summarily dismissed as junk.

The tide has turned, and researchers are finding more uses for non-coding DNA.

And they are beginning to understand that DNA is much more complicated than they dared to believe.

A paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Glasgow “describes how double-stranded DNA splits using delocalized sound waves that are the hallmark of quantum effects.”

An article posted on Phys.org provides some background information:

“DNA contains the code to life and holds a blueprint for each and every living thing on earth. Dedicated enzymes responsible for making new proteins read the code by splitting the double strand in order to access the information. One of the big outstanding questions of biology has been how these enzymes find the initial hole or ‘bubble’ in the double strand to start reading the code.”

The article goes on to say:

“Dr Mario González Jiménez, researcher, explains, ‘It is believed that DNA has regions where a specific sequence of bases modifies the stiffness of the double helix favouring the formation of bubbles. This causes a break of the weak bonds between the strands showing the transcription and replication enzymes where to start their task.’ "

The researchers used a laser to test whether they could detect any “sound-like bubbles” in DNA.

They could. As researcher Thomas Harwood puts it,

"The sound waves in DNA are not your ordinary sounds waves. They have a frequency of a few terahertz or a billion times higher than a human or a dog can hear!"

This is certainly not a Darwinian explanation. Real biology is really complicated, and bears all the hallmarks of intelligent design.

Source:

University of Glasgow. 2016. Sound-like bubbles whizzing around in DNA are essential to life Phys.org. (2 June).

Our eyes focus automatically and adjust to gradual changes in light /darkness. Science knows of many other ways in which our bodies react to internal and/or environmental cues.

A new paper published in the journal Nature Communications looks at how synthetic circuits can be prodded to perform complex computations. A report posted on Phys.org says:

“Synthetic biological systems … have tended to focus on either analogue or digital processing, limiting the range of applications for which they can be used.”

In other words, they are not as efficient or resilient as authentic biological cells.

“But now a team of researchers at MIT has developed a technique to integrate both analogue and digital computation in living cells, allowing them to form gene circuits capable of carrying out complex processing operations.”

Darwinian mechanisms cannot improve living systems, but when it comes to design, it’s an entirely different story.

The researchers realised that our cells are able to respond intelligently to signals coming from their surroundings. They hope to make use of this natural ability to monitor glucose levels in blood or inflammation levels in the gut.

There is little if anything haphazard or random in the way our cells respond to environmental signals. The ensuing changes are definitely not of the Darwinian type.

Intelligence runs the show.

Evolution does not design. In contrast, we see signs of amazing design, organization, complexity, designed features and even beauty almost everywhere, including us.

It has become increasingly difficult to credit evolution or naturalistic processes for the excellent design we see in us and other organisms.

A new paper published in the journal Chemistry of Materials on work by researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin examines the composition of dentin, the part of our teeth just below the enamel.

The institute issued a press release with the word 'super-natural' in the title (Dentin nanostructures – a super-natural phenomenon), and then went on to say:

“Dentin is one of the most durable biological materials in the human body. Researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin were able to show that the reason for this can be traced to its nanostructures and specifically to the interactions between the organic and inorganic components. Measurements performed at BESSYII, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin's synchrotron radiation source, showed that it is the mechanical coupling between the collagen protein fibers and mineral nanoparticles which renders dentin capable of withstanding extreme forces.”

The press release did not attempt to entertain readers with a Darwinian pathway of how teeth evolved from non-teeth but instead stuck to facts:

“In humans, teeth come into contact almost 5,000 times per day under normal use. In spite of this, and although we often use large forces during mastication, it is surprisingly rare for healthy teeth to break.”

It does not shy away from using the word design:

“It is widely accepted that the design of teeth makes teeth tough, where an inner core, known as dentin, supports the outer hard enamel cap. The secret to the marked toughness lies in the structural details. Dentin is a bone-like substance, which is composed of mineral nanoparticles, collagen and water. While both enamel and dentine are composed of the same mineral called carbonated hydroxyapatite (cHAP), dentin represents a complex nanocomposite material. It consists of inorganic cHAP nanoparticles embedded in an organic matrix of collagen protein fibers. A group of researchers, led by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Forien and Dr. Paul Zaslansky from Charité's Julius Wolff Institute, had previously shown that residual stress in dentin contributes to the high load-bearing capacity of this biological structure.”

In other words, our teeth are amazingly well and meticulously designed to keep us living. Their strength is far more greater than one would expect in a Darwinian world that is obsessed with survival.

This research is bad news for evolutionists, as complexity does not just happen, evolution does not learn and does not design.

Thursday, 2 June 2016

The peppered moth (Biston betularia) is one of the most famous icons of evolution that Darwinists have treasured since the Victorian times.

Recently, a paper published in Nature examined the genetic changes that made the peppered moth famous. Dr Ilik Saccheri, at the University of Liverpool, one of the co-authors of the study, believes that a mutation occurred in a transposable element (TE or transposon) probably in 1819, helping the moth to adapt to a darker industrial world.

While the darker moths were better able to survive in cities, the lighter variety did not die out, and since the 1960s, their numbers have increased considerably, as the air in urban centres has become cleaner.

Whereas evolutionists are fond of parading the peppered moth as an example of rapid evolution, it might be more logical to think of it as an illustration of adaptation. No change of the Darwinian variety occurred. As in the case of Darwin’s finches, it had to do with a tiny change that didn’t even last long.

The Biston betularia shows that there’s hardly any solid evidence for Darwinian change but much more for the ability of organisms to adapt to challenging environments.